The Way of Integrity: Finding the Path to Your True Self

by Martha Beck

Listen: the problem isn’t how hard you’re working, it’s that you’re working on things that aren’t right for you. Your goals and motivations aren’t harmonizing with your deepest truth. They didn’t come from your own natural inclinations. They came from the two forces that drive us all off our true paths: trauma and socialization.

Kant believed that our minds create all our experience, including space and time. There may be a reality out there, but we can perceive it only through the filter of our subjective perceptions, which means that no one can ever know what’s absolutely true.

your thoughts, even thoughts you absolutely believe, may not always be true.

Our worst psychological suffering comes from thoughts that we genuinely believe, while simultaneously knowing they aren’t true.

Believing things that aren’t true for us at the deepest level is the commonest way in which we lose our integrity. Then suffering arises—not as punishment, but as a signal that we’re being torn apart. The purpose of suffering is to help us locate our internal divisions, reclaim our reality, and heal these inner rifts.

We aren’t trained to nurture doubt and seek disconfirmation—quite the opposite. We like to strongly affirm our beliefs and prove that we’re right, dammit!

“Belief is just someone saying something near you enough times.”

I like this one so much❤️

Our miraculous minds can take strings of sounds, attach them to images and emotions, and honestly conclude that the abstract ideas they convey are Universal Truths.

Indeed :)

I was a person, after all, and people orient their lives by obeying social standards.

“Yes, I’m absolutely comfortable in my uncomfortable position.”)